Rumpus Original
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Swinging Modern Sounds #68: A Way of Life
The thing about Scott Tuma is: the immense pathos of the recordings… Almost no one, frankly, is allowed to sound this sad and continue to have a musical career.
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Wild Things
Statistics make us feel safe, but most of the time, they can’t predict what’s really going to happen in our life. We believe in them anyway, though.
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Johnson
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Adam Johnson talks about his new book, Fortune Smiles, fiction and voice, veterans and defectors, solar-powered robots and self-driving cars, and infrared baseball caps that can blind security cameras.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Redheads
I’ve been a sucker for redheads since the day in second grade when chubby Johnny with the glasses kissed me on the playground and told me I was his girlfriend.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: On Madness and Mad Men
In my eight years as a Mad Men fan, the series has repeatedly prompted me to reflect on parenting.
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Housesitting
When you arrived, you reached under the mat to pick up the keys in an envelope. Inside, a note on the kitchen counter said help yourself to anything in the pantry or fridge.
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The Rumpus Interview with Deborah Reed
Author Deborah Reed discusses her latest novel, Olivay, the necessity of fire, Los Angeles anxiety, and how she found fulfillment at the edge of the American West.
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Sound Takes: Let’s Knife
Analysis fails before this mysterious amalgam of silliness and sublimity. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for songs with cat whiskers in them.
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I’ll Fly Away: Notes on Economy Class Citizenship
I want to break from a continued and systematic white supremacy so pervasive it is entrenched in the vernacular I use to express myself.
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant talks sex workers’ rights, labor politics, the novelty of women’s sexuality, and her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Couple of Puzzles
This was the first pure poetry I ever knew. Sung out loud more or less to no one on a theme of longing. Wife. Sons. Rags. Snow. Stalks of corn.
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But Beautiful: My Life with Billie Holiday
I had to look back at the late nights when her voice has sung me out of sadness to sleep, back to those Saturday afternoons of my childhood, and ask myself what I had learned from her, as a musician…